


Finishing The Job

by Aliax



Category: A Land Fit for Heroes - Richard Morgan
Genre: Angst and Feels, M/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-16
Updated: 2018-03-16
Packaged: 2019-04-01 06:19:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13992264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aliax/pseuds/Aliax
Summary: Set towards the end of The Cold Commands. After Ringil is given back the Ravensfriend, and before he heads back to the real world to dispatch Risgillen and save Yhelteth, there's one last thing he needs to do.





	Finishing The Job

**Author's Note:**

> I know that technically, this was all a psychological trap Risgillen set up through magic and Gil's own feelings of guilt, but... *shrugs* I wanted some real closure for that particular episode.

Ringil waded back to shore, dripping and clutching the Ravensfriend to him in both hands.  
  
Hjel was gone. Only the towering edifice of the _ikinri ‘ska_ remained, and the narrow cleft wedged within it, with its gravelly path leading back to the unseen marsh.  
  
It was hard to tear his gaze away from the massive cliffs, and the even more massive amount of knowledge and power engraved all over them. So much to learn, so little time…  
  
He shook himself. He had duties to attend to!  
  
He had people to kill, and people to save.  
  
He rested the Ravensfriend on his shoulder as he walked back up the path. The akiya hadn’t given him the scabbard along with the sword, but that didn’t matter for the time being. After all, he was only going to need the naked blade for the tasks ahead.  
  
Soon, too soon, the crunch under his feet turned wet and splashy again. The bitter wind picked up once more, though this time it didn’t chill him to the bone, even though he was still wet from his dip into the tarn.  
  
The moans and laments of the many thousand weeping stump-mounted heads, however, cut to his soul as harshly as ever - possibly even harsher still, now that he knew what he needed to do about them.  
  
_You’ll be doing them a favor, you know.  
  
Hell of a fucking favour!_  
  
But before that, he needed to finish the business he had been sent here to deal with. His way was obviously not what Risgillen had envisioned, but he didn’t mind depriving her of her vengeance - though strictly speaking, not on his own account.  
  
_Tell me, Risgillen, how is this supposed to solve anything, exactly?_  
  
He heard Seethlaw howl once more, very distantly.  
  
_It doesn’t make him suffer any less, does it? It doesn’t make him be any less lost. This isn’t about him at all, in the end, is it?_  
  
It wasn’t. It was all about her - her pain, her loss, her grief. And Ringil understood that, and he respected it, and maybe if her solution had effectively brought lasting relief to Seethlaw, then Ringil might have been tempted to go through with it.  
  
Maybe. Might.  
  
But it didn’t, so his mind was easy to make up.  
  
_If you won’t or can’t put him out of this misery, then I will._  
  
Admittedly, he was the one who had thrown Seethlaw _into_ this misery to begin with, but that had never been his intention. He hadn’t known that just killing Seethlaw would not, you know, fucking _kill_ him! How was he supposed to know that!?  
  
He kicked at a puddle, sending dark water splashing around. Fucking Grey Places, with their fucking weird laws, and their fucking insane dwenda who slipped from one world to the other from birth, and couldn’t seem to properly stick to one plane - not even in fucking _death_ …

Ringil picked a place at random in the endless marsh, and sat down. He laid the Ravensfriend across his folded knees, closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to look at the wandering heads around him, and waited.  
  
He listened to the wind. He listened to Seethlaw’s howls growing ever closer. He tried _not_ to listen to the laments and the cries of the weeping souls.  
  
_Wish you were here to calm them down, Hjel..._  
  
He shook his head. No, that wasn’t right. This was between him and Seethlaw only; Hjel had already done more than his share here.  
  
He felt the standing stones rise around him.  
  
He opened his eyes. Stood up as well, with the Ravensfriend held loosely in his hand.  
  
Waited some more.  
  
“Rrrrringillll…”  
  
And then Seethlaw was bounding again into the circle, running at him--  
  
Stopping dead in his tracks at the sight of the Black Scourge sword.  
  
“Hello, Seethlaw,” Ringil whispered, gently.  
  
The thing that was Seethlaw stumbled back several steps, and crouched in the high marsh grass - tight angular mass of bone-white limbs, wrapped in long black hair as if in a thin, fraying cloak.  
  
It growled, a long rumble full of anger and pain. Behind the veil of black hair whipped by the wind, the one featureless, pitch-black eye fixed on him, glaring.  
  
“This is the last time,” Ringil said, still keeping his voice low and warm. He raised the tip of the Ravensfriend a couple feet in the air. The thing that was Seethlaw shivered violently and gave out a rough snarl, but didn’t budge. Ringil lowered the sword again, and concluded, “No more suffering this time, I promise.”  
  
Only silence greeted him. The one pitch eye was still fixed on him, and Ringil could still feel the waves of rage roiling from the gathered creature, but there was also a waiting, an expectation, hanging in the air between them now.  
  
“For what it’s worth…” Ringil shrugged. “I apologize for messing up the job the first time around.” He looked straight into the pitch eye. “I didn’t even know that was possible.”  
  
Leave it to the dwenda to not really die when you killed them. It made sense to Ringil _now,_ after all the time he had spent in the Grey Places they were native to, but at the time, he had not understood. And to be fair, it probably wasn’t just that either; the proximity of the Kiriath weapon may well have played a role in this as well. Seethlaw had told him, hadn’t he?  
  
_“At the spear point was a device that tore reality apart. Fifty thousand died or were swept away, out in the wash of the greater march. We still sometimes find their remains today. Some still live, after a fashion.”_  
  
Some still live, after a fashion: that seemed to Ringil a good way of describing the thing that was Seethlaw right now, crouching in the grass a few yards from him.  
  
He shivered when a rasping sound - not a growl, nor a howl - rose from the creature. It took him a moment to understand that it was a word, a single one.  
  
“Why?”  
  
Why…? “Why what?” There were so many things that question could refer to!  
  
The thing that was Seethlaw moved. Or… no. It didn’t move; it changed form, in ways Ringil couldn’t quite see or follow, just like it had done all the previous times when it alternated between walking on two legs or on four, just like its broken face would sometimes seem almost human and sometimes very much dog-like. Now it looked far more clearly like a man, sitting with his legs pulled up all the way to his chest, his arms around his shins, his back bent so his face was half-hidden behind his knees.  
  
“Why did you leave me?” it said, finally. The voice was raw, harsh, with none of the melodic vibrancy Ringil remembered - but it was undeniably Seethlaw’s voice, and that simple fact made Ringil’s heart jump in his chest, and his blood run faster.  
  
Ringil hesitated, and looked away. There were several answers to that question - some easy to give, others almost too painful to so much as contemplate.  
  
There was the blunt truth: that he didn’t really know, that it hadn’t been a truly conscious decision, just a move made on the spur of the moment, the grabbing of an unexpected opportunity.  
  
But behind that…  
  
“I was afraid,” he admitted on a whisper, staring at one of the standing stones over Seethlaw’s shoulder.  
  
Seethlaw grunted. “Of me?” He seemed sincerely surprised, and Ringil supposed that made sense. Seethlaw could have killed him at almost any given time, yet he had gone out of his way not to, up until Ringil himself had left him no choice.  
  
He shook his head. “No. Of myself.”  
  
He swallowed. This was something he would never admit to anyone else, not even Hjel or Archeth.  
  
He stared straight into the pitch-black eye - no, eyes now, and that earned him another kick in the chest - and forced the words out while making a wide gesture with his left arm, encompassing the marsh around them. “Remember when we argued about those things?”  
  
Seethlaw turned his head, and Ringil’s breath caught brutally in his throat at the sight of the now whole and repaired, perfect profile. He watched as Seethlaw frowned, suddenly understood - and the wide, bare shoulders hunched a little more as the empty eyes settled on Ringil again.  
  
“Yeah, we had a pretty big disagreement,” Ringil said as lightly as he could. “About that, and about how you were going to sacrifice a bunch of human beings and all that shit.”  
  
Seethlaw had not hidden his disappointment at the time. He had even explicitly said that he had hoped Ringil would understand better than most.  
  
“So… I was angry,” Ringil continued. “Really angry. I was disgusted. And rationally, I knew there and then that after all was said and done, there was simply no way for dwenda and humans to live together.”  
  
He swallowed again, had to look away again. Looked for the right words to explain further.  
  
“You told me that, yes.” Seethlaw’s voice was healing still; there was music at the edges of it now, like an old, creaky instrument being carefully repaired and tuned by a devoted artisan. “But you said nothing about leaving.”  
  
“No, I didn’t, because I didn’t need to think about it. Not yet, I mean. I had the perfect excuse to stay, and the perfect excuse to leave: Sherin. You were going to let me take her back home, so I didn’t have to think about what I really wanted.”  
  
He paused, his breath short and choking on the upcoming truth. “I didn’t…” He stared into the empty eyes again, held onto them, and wasn’t _that_ a huge fucking problem in itself, the way looking into that face comforted him and gave him strength!? “I didn’t have to face the fact that even though I hated that side of you, and everything you fought for, I would still gladly stay and look the other way for as long as you’d want me to.”  
  
There. He was panting, but the truth was out now.

Except it didn’t make much sense, of course. Seethlaw frowned. “But you still left.”  
  
Ringil let out a pitiful bark of laughter. “It was all purely a matter of circumstances. Of luck.” Good or bad, he couldn’t say. “Running into the Dragonbane… Watching you put a spell on him…” His voice grew plaintive, almost begging. “Anyone else… Almost anyone else, I would have let you do it. But Egar… Egar is more than a friend.”  
  
This time, the way Seethlaw bristled sent a kick through both Ringil’s chest and his groin. In another context, he would have chuckled at how utterly misplaced the dwenda’s jealousy was in this case. But there was too much raw urgency coursing through his nerves to bother with it. He simply shook his head.  
  
“No, not like that. He and I, we are comrades-in-arms, battle-forged brothers. He’s one of the very small handful of people I would trust with my life, or my secrets.” Seethlaw still glowered; he’d always had a possessive streak, Ringil had quickly noticed that back then - and being once again subjected to it still threatened to melt too many things within Ringil’s guts, to make him falter and give in…  
  
He plowed on. “We fought the Scaled Folk together. We took a dragon down together. So running into him… It reminded me of who I used to be. What I used to fight for.”  
  
And now the words stopped coming. He couldn’t explain any further. He could only stare into Seethlaw’s eyes, and hope that his old lover would _understand._  
  
He did.  
  
“The children,” he said quietly, and his voice had grown yet more achingly beautiful still. “You will always fight for the children, even though they’ll only grow up to be adults who will hate you like their parents did.”  
  
Their very first discussion…  
  
“Yes,” Ringil let out on a breath. He tried to chuckle. Failed. Didn’t bother shrugging. “Can’t help it, sorry.”  
  
Seethlaw only stared back at him.  
  
Silence stretched between them, as desolate as the marsh plains around them.  
  
And then Seethlaw straightened his back, lowered his knees. Shook his head.  
  
“You were too old. I, of all Aldrain, should have known.” He shook his head again, looked away in his turn. “Knew. I _knew,_ even if I didn’t want to accept it.” He took a deep breath; he looked tired suddenly. “And I suppose Risgillen knew too.” He was speaking so softly, Ringil wasn’t even sure the words were truly meant for him, even if they were said in Naomic. “Though she didn’t dare speak up, not in those circumstances. She probably thought it was safe enough to wait a few months, at least until--”  
  
He caught himself then. Reined himself in, and faced Ringil again. “There are rules for such things, and I failed to follow them. I told myself they didn’t apply because this was different, because I wasn’t trying to achieve the same result.”  
  
Ringil had to look away again then.  
  
He was quite sure he knew what the dwenda was referring to, but like hell was he going to bring up the topic of the Illwrack Changeling, and Seethlaw’s possible role in the whole matter. He remembered cut off phrases, and allusions, and they aligned a bit too well with the whole fucking tale, and that made dark, jagged shards roll around in his chest, prick at his heart and his guts, leaving him bleeding from the inside with a pain he refused to acknowledge, refused to read for what it truly was, because that way lay only embarrassment and weakness.  
  
So he kept silent, kept staring at one of the standing stones, and tried to pretend none of this really concerned him, that it was all only Seethlaw’s problem.  
  
“I should have killed you when we first met,” the dwenda concluded quietly, and Ringil shuddered, both at the toneless manner in which the words were uttered, and at the knowledge of how easily Seethlaw could have done it. Ringil had put up a good fight back then, but he had discovered the hard way later on that the only reason he had suffered no stronger injuries than the kick-inflicted concussion, was because Seethlaw had been holding back, precisely not to hurt him more than necessary.  
  
Holding back…  
  
For the first time ever, Ringil allowed himself to face the _other_ truth, the one which had gnawed at the edges of his mind since their _other_ fateful night, but which he had always pushed back, because - he told himself - there was no point looking into it too closely anymore, no point in poking around that particular ant’s hill, and possibly uncovering yet more obvious secrets he would much rather never have to own.  
  
It had been cowardly behavior, but Seethlaw had been dead, so it had been a cowardice Ringil could afford.  
  
Now, though…  
  
He opened his mouth, pushed the words out in a rough, raw, stumbling column, like refugees out of a wrecked city. “You could also have killed me the _last_ time we met.”  
  
He had missed it in the fury of the moment, but it had become obvious in hindsight as he contemplated the position and extent of his wounds.  
  
That was when he had realized what Seethlaw had done - that even in the midst of his rage, even as he kept driving the black, blue-edged sword through the faults of Ringil’s mish-mashed armor and into his body beneath… Seethlaw had _still_ been holding back.  
  
“You weren’t trying to kill me,” Ringil continued, his eyes still stubbornly fixed on the standing stone. “You were just trying to injure me badly enough that I’d fall and be out of the fight.”  
  
And _now_ he could look at Seethlaw again, straight into the deceptively blank eyes. “You wanted to take me back alive.”  
  
Silence.  
  
Seethlaw didn’t look away, didn’t speak. It was as good as an open admission, and it ripped Ringil’s chest apart.  
  
His vision blurred. He didn’t mind it.

It was Seethlaw who broke the silence, eventually, his melodic voice soft, almost apologetic. “As I said, I made a mistake.”  
  
_It’s not your fault._  
  
Ringil’s eyes screwed up convulsively. His hand on the Ravensfriend twitched and gripped it almost desperately; the other balled into a fist. He felt the call for battle, the itch to _fight_ \- fight something, _anything_ \- crawl throughout his muscles, skip along his nerves, restlessly looking for a way to reject those words.  
  
Reject the words. Deflect the unspoken comfort - and with it, looming behind it as terrifying and stomach-turning as the shadow of a dragon, the inconceivable, unacceptable, utterly unwanted fucking _forgiveness_.  
  
Seethlaw hating him, he gladly accepted. Seethlaw seeking a hopeless revenge, he could deal with. The rage, the anger, the resentment: he _welcomed_ them all.  
  
But forgiveness!?  
  
… In the absence of anything physical to fight, Ringil looked for a verbal weapon, any retort, to beat back the growing horror. “Risgillen seems to think otherwise!”  
  
The loathing only washed over him anew, stronger still, when he heard the gentle smile in the dwenda’s voice in response. “She was always too protective of me, and far too lenient in dealing with my errors.”  
  
_Not your fault. Not your fault, notyourfault, notyourfaultnotyourfaultnot--  
  
SHUT. The fuck. UP!_  
  
His eyes snapped open as the echoes of his mental scream rang through his head. His vision was clear again. His feet were planted wide apart, in a defensive stance he didn’t remember taking. Both his hands were wrapped around the Ravensfriend’s pommel now, holding the sword up in the air, its tip pointed straight forward - straight towards Seethlaw.  
  
Whose mouth was still crooked in a sad, small smile.  
  
Ringil watched, with his heartbeat pounding in his ears, and his limbs only managing to remain on this side of shaking uncontrollably through sheer, teeth-gritted stubbornness, and half a lifetime of military training, as Seethlaw finally stood up as well.  
  
Slowly, the dwenda unwrapped himself, pushed himself up, stood there, arms hanging loosely at his sides, naked and weaponless, his bone-white skin almost gleaming in the eternal gloom of the marsh.  
  
He looked for all the world like he owned the place, like he held all the cards here - like Ringil, and the Kiriath blade in his hands, were but mere inconveniences he could dismiss with a wave of his fingers.  
  
… Dear gods, but he was _beautiful._  
  
He was beautiful, and Ringil tried, desperately tried to hang onto the fire the sight inevitably kindled in his groin. Hold onto the arousal, feed it with hungry eyes roaming up and down that gorgeous body, and with memories of how it would feel under Ringil’s hands, the cool touch of it, the deceptive strength - the heat of the iron bar if he could only revive it...  
  
Once, just this once, just for once in his fucking life, Ringil _wished_ he could drown in the fire of arousal!  
  
... Just so he could ignore the renewed ripping in his chest, the fountain of bitter blood dropping like acid into his guts and through his veins, at the thought of what he expected himself to do now, and what it would do to him in turn.  
  
Seethlaw stepped forward then, slowly, as though it was he who was the hunter, and Ringil who was the prey.  
  
He had regained all his natural poise, and Ringil was as hypnotized as he’d ever been. He couldn’t move, couldn’t back away. All he could do was not lower the Ravensfriend. He held it still fast and strong, its tip still aimed straight at the advancing dwenda. It was the least he could do - but it was also the most he could do…  
  
When he came within reach, Seethlaw stopped and extended a hand. He hesitated, briefly, before laying a finger on the very tip of the Kiriath blade. Ringil thought he saw him wince, saw him attempt to recoil from the touch of this deadly artefact created by the Aldrain’s most sworn and implacable enemies.  
  
But he didn’t.  
  
Instead, he wrapped his hand around the blade, in a way eerily reminiscent of how he would sometimes hold Ringil by the back of his neck, and bring him into one of those kisses which made Ringil lose his mind, forget where he was, forget that he had promised to one day kill the creature pressing against him, and instead made him want only one thing: to melt into that touch, to fold himself into the dwenda’s lust for him forever, and to empty himself - his own need, his own consciousness, his own entirety - into the hands and mouth and body tearing the last remnants of his will apart.  
  
Ringil realized what Seethlaw had in mind when the dwenda reached for the blade with his second hand as well, and stepped forward again.

Ringil didn’t move.  
  
He _wanted_ to, desperately.  
  
But he didn’t.  
  
This was the most he could do; it was also the least he could do. Stand here. Don’t move an inch. Keep the blade up, steadfast and loyal and reliable.  
  
Watch it pierce effortlessly through the bone-white chest. Watch the thin arms convulse briefly, the long fingers seize and spasm but never let go of the Kiriath steel. Watch the sad, small smile turn into a clenched-jawed mask of determination.  
  
A smell Ringil had hoped never to meet again rose into the air. Even with the wind shuffling around them, the spiced alien reek filled Ringil’s nostrils, turned his stomach upside-down, sent his thoughts and his emotions scattering ever more haphazardly in his mind and heart.  
  
But still he held on with both hands. Didn’t budge one inch.  
  
Watched the dark streaks run down Seethlaw’s stomach, over his hips, down his legs.  
  
Watched one of the white hands let go of the blade, and beckon to him with a crook of the long fingers.  
  
Only then did he move.  
  
They both did.  
  
Ringil’s feet shuffled noisily through the tall, wet marsh grass; Seethlaw’s slipped silently forward, eternal poise still etched into every one of his moves even as his life dripped out of him.  
  
Closer they came...  
  
… Until there was nowhere left to go anymore.  
  
Until one cool hand was laid onto Ringil’s own where he was holding the pommel of the Ravensfriend fast and strong, and cold fingertips ran lightly down his face, leaving a burning, yawning ache in their trail, before bunching into the collar of his cloak and holding onto it as if onto--  
  
Another kick in the chest. _Ignore! Focus!_  
  
The dark alien blood, pouring so freely over Ringil’s hands, drenching his sleeves at the wrists...  
  
Seethlaw’s face, so close Ringil could hear every one of his gasping breaths over the keening of the wind and the laments of the stump-mounted heads.  
  
The pitch-black eyes, so wide in pain, Ringil thought he was going to fall into them, and drown there.  
  
And the half-open mouth... Ringil could distinguish every dark bubble rising at its corners, watch them pop or dribble down the bone-white chin...  
  
He freed one hand from between the hard, unyielding presence of the pommel of the Ravensfriend, and the now shivering cover of Seethlaw’s palm, and reached behind the dwenda’s head. He dug carefully into the long black hair, went looking for the nape of the slender neck.  
  
Gripped it firm, and pulled on it even as he leaned in.  
  
Seethlaw’s lips were cold, _so cold_ against his own.  
  
Ringil closed his eyes, as though that might forever delay the inevitable. He licked and swallowed the spiced blood foaming out of the painfully panting mouth. His tongue went looking for Seethlaw’s, stroked against it, almost beggingly - and felt it respond, but so weakly, so sluggishly...  
  
He heard the harsh, gurgling moans rising from the dwenda’s throat. He listened to his increasingly frantic attempts to breathe through his nose. When the shivering turned into violent shudders, he absorbed each of them into his own body, all the way down to his bones, made no attempt to cushion them, to smother the way his own nerves and muscles trembled and twisted and _screamed_ in response.  
  
He just kept his mouth fastened to Seethlaw’s, and his hands gripped in place around the Ravensfriend’s pommel and behind Seethlaw’s head.  
  
He desperately drank in the last erratic breaths, the last exhausted tremors - the last squeeze of Seethlaw’s fingers on his own.  
  
And then, eyes still closed against the unfathomable growing loss, he absorbed the loud silence in the heart of the howling winds and the never-ending lament of the tree-mounted heads, and the melting away of the weight on his blade, and the vanishing touch of the lips on his own and of the long hair through his fingers…  
  
When he opened his eyes, he was alone, with nothing but blood - blood everywhere, on his sword, his hands, his clothes, on his face and deep in his throat - only blood, to vouch for his teetering sanity and attest to the veracity of what had happened.  
  
Blood, and tears, and a ripped-open scar in his heart and soul, an empty, bottomless hole, which had never truly healed in the first place, and - he knew it for sure this time - would never fully close now, even should he live a thousand fucking years.

** The End **


End file.
